


facing the rose, the dark sky, and the drum

by gatsbyparty



Series: Elysiumstuck [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Tinkerbull does his best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-11
Updated: 2012-08-11
Packaged: 2017-11-11 22:29:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/483554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her patron trades her eye for a gambling debt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	facing the rose, the dark sky, and the drum

  
  
Her patron trades her eye for a gambling debt.   
  
It's common enough among the blues of the spectrum to take in a caste grub, especially if they were raised by a patron as well. Her Imperious Condescension encourages the practice, as it results in better socialized and better educated shock troops and engineers. It is not a common sentiment that the Empress has reasonable expectations of her people. The blues have more wealth at their disposal than warmer colors, and less of the restraint that comes from living centuries like cooler shades.   
  
A navy grub hatches, live and peeping, with a tangle of hair as large as her body. This particular navy grub is normal in regards to temperament and conformation, even down to the tiny, nonfunctional thoracic gill slits of an in-betweener. She is taken directly from the caverns and given to the care of a patron, still sopping wet with four shades of blood. Her patron is Marquise Mindfang, one of the oldest blues in Black Harbor, and she is one of the only adult trolls Vriska will ever meet that keeps her lusus in the lawnring.   
  
Grubs are small and vicious, with long teeth and longer claws. Vriska is no exception, although she's effectively tamed as soon as she pupates. There are few grubs in Black Harbor, few grubs in any city, and fewer still that make it to pupation with their teeth as sharp as hatching. Vriska’s fangs are filed down nearly the moment she comes out of the cocoon, her hair pinned and twisted into pointlessly elaborate hairstyles. There are gowns and waistcoasts and high-saturation navy stockings and pompes, all of it twelve kinds of awful. It’s absolutely dreadful to try and outrun Spidermom in five inch pompes and a banyan.   
  
Vriska is six sweeps the day Mindfang comes home with a medicalancer and a cull order and cuts out her eye. It fetches a decent price on the market. Pupa eyes are still silver, can reconnect to a new body’s blood system to replace an eye gone bad. Vriska covers the eye with a patch and leaves the next day with nothing but a pupa’s plain government-issued clothes and a torn off button down. She’s high enough on the spectrum to not get cold, fast and fierce enough to take down the mountainbeasts, wild enough to eat them raw, she tells herself. Vriska Serket is not a sack of spare parts. It takes her a year to work her way to the human border, a town called Echidna, and then go further north into the forests from there.   
  
She meets her first chimaera in the trees a hundred miles from Echidna. Her eye flashes silver. The beast comes forward like a bleatbeast to ritual slaughter. Vriska forces it to hold still, blunting the sentient bits of its mind when it moves, runs her fingers over the clumsy seams binding together a human arm and a lusus’s glowing white shoulder.   
  
“You’re an abomination, “ she tells it in delight, makes it walk round her so she can see how clumsily a cliff ghast’s tentacle and a row of spikes function as legs. The beast bits strain against her hold, batters at her tenuous hold on the sentient bits, so she pins it still and lops it head off with her cutlass.   
  
She moves on, a new scarf of lusus white a slash against her skin.  
  
She finds Nitram seventy miles further east into troll territory, in his little hive with his little lusus. Brown as he is, pupa as he is, he towers over her already, until she tricks him into jumping into the ravine. She feels dizzy with pale when she hauls him back up, prods at his legs to see if he can feel it. He can’t, of course, and it won’t be until they’re nine that they meet Equius Zahhak and his prosthetics.    
  
“She who causes the throat to breathe,” she tells Tavros, he sprawled back in his re’coon and she leaning on the edge of it. “She who tightens the throat! So you can see how my place here is sort of indistinct.”  
  
“Not really,” Tavros says, his voice still wheezy from a pulmonary contusion. “I mean, you did make me jump into a ravine, and, uh, you never really apologized for it, so I can’t, uh, say as you’ve reached the balance inherent in that, uh, particular translation.”  
  
“I fixed you, though! I didn’t cull you, did I?”  
  
“No, but if you had, had tried, I’d have pushed  you into the ravine and then, uh, that wouldn’t get either of us anywhere, because we’d both be dead.”  
  
Vriska makes a face, props her chin up on her hand.  
  
“Karmic retribution, pupa! Everyone gets what comes to them in the fullness of time-” she traces a little circle in the air with her other hand “-and if I take care of this now, then what I get will be even better later! And you, I guess, just get the good all the time.”  
  
“Vriska, that doesn’t even make  sense .”  
  
She leaves not even a season later, because she’s only six and desperately pale and in midwinter Tinkerbull can’t find enough food for two growing trolls, and Vriska is the only one who can get to Spithen. 


End file.
